Hair Today

For whatever reason, the "memory game" seems to be a popular subgenre of children's board games. I've played quite a few in my time -- though I couldn't tell you exactly how many. (Hmmm... maybe that's the real memory game.) One of the more recent I tried is called Leo, and if you're ever going to find yourself playing a game with kids that you probably wouldn't have chosen yourself (the game, not the kids), this one is actually rather satisfying.

Leo is a lion who really needs to get to the barber for a haircut. (It the age of COVID-19, you might relate.) A line of tiles are shuffled and arranged face down like stepping stones, with the bed Leo wakes up in every morning on one end, and the barber on the other. But Leo is easily distracted by conversations on his way to the barber, and if he loses too many hours, the barber will close before he can get there. Working as a team, players have four chances (days) to get Leo his haircut.

Play proceeds around the circle, with each player playing one card from a hand of four. Each card moves Leo from 1 to 4 spaces, and reveals the tile he lands on. It's always an animal of a particular type and color -- the type being the number of "hours" Leo stops to chat (from 1 to 5), and the color being your chance to avoid that loss of time. If the card you played to move Leo is the same color as the tile he lands on, you lose no time at all. (You also lose no time if Leo lands on one of a handful of "signposts" also shuffled into the pack.)

You have 12 hours to work with each day -- and a lot of tiles to get through. Without a lot of luck, you're going to fail on day one. But that's where the memory aspect comes in. At the end of a failed attempt, players study the tiles Leo stepped on before hiding them again and starting another day. Next time around, you have two strategic angles to work: try to play a card that will make Leo land on a matching color, or try at least to make Leo land on something that costs only 1 or 2 hours rather than more.

The teamwork aspect of this game makes it quite a lot more enjoyable than your typical "flip over two cards and see if they match" memory game. That's also good if you have a child not yet able to really deal with the lesson that "sometimes, you lose a game" -- you're all in this game together.

It's also nice that you can approach the memorization in several ways -- carving up sections of the path for different players to remember, or tasking some people with focusing on color while others focus on number. It's not deep strategy, of course, but it's infinitely more than many children's games bother incorporating.

Being honest, of course, it seems unlikely I'd ever play a game of Leo if there weren't kids around. On the other hand, if the situation ever somehow presented itself, it wouldn't be crazy to actually play a quick 10-minute game just with adults, unlike other "games" for kids. I might say Leo merits a B. If you're a gamer parent hoping to raise a young gamer kid, you might want to check this one out.